“She’ll be out directly. What’s up, Lyle?” I walked toward the rabbit hutches under the trees so he would have to follow me.
He didn’t speak for a while. Instead he combed his waxed brown conked hair in the shade and looked out toward my dock and the cypress swamp on the far side of the bayou. Then he put his comb in his shirt pocket.
“You don’t approve of me, do you?” he said.
I opened the chicken-wire door to one of the hutches and began filling the rabbits’ bowl with alfalfa pellets.
“Maybe I don’t approve of what you do, Lyle,” I said.
“I don’t apologize for it.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“I can heal, son.”
I looked at my watch, opened up the next hutch, and didn’t answer him.
“I don’t brag on it,” he said. “It’s a gift. I didn’t earn it. But the power comes through my shoulder, through my arm, right through this deformity of a hand, right into their bodies. I can feel the power swell up in my arm just like I was holding a bucket of water by the bail, then it’s gone, from me into them, and my arm’s so light it’s like my sleeve is empty. You can believe it or not, son. But it’s God’s truth. I tell you another thing. You got a sick woman up in that house.”
I set down the alfalfa bag, latched the hutch door, and turned to look directly into his face.
“I’m going to ask two things of you, Lyle. Don’t call me ‘son’ again, and don’t pretend you know anything about my family’s problems.”
He scratched the back of his deformed hand and looked up toward the house. Then he sucked quietly on the back of his teeth and said, “It wasn’t meant as an offense. That’s not my purpose. No, sir.”
“What can I help you with today?”
“You’ve got it turned around. You went out to Weldon’s, but he wouldn’t tell you diddly-squat, would he?”
“What about Weldon’s?”
“Somebody shot at him. Bama called me right after she called y’all. Look, Dave, Weldon’s not going to cooperate with you. He can’t. He’s afraid.”
“Of what?”
“The same thing most people are afraid of when they’re afraid—facing up to the truth about something.”
“Weldon doesn’t impress me a
s a fearful man.”
“You didn’t know our old man.”
“What are you talking about, Lyle?”
“The man with the burned-off face that Bama saw through her window. I’ve seen him, too. He was sitting in the third row at last Sunday’s telecast. I almost pulled the mike out of the jack when my eyes got focused on him and I saw the face behind all that scar tissue. It was like holding up a photographic negative to a light until you see the image inside the shadows, you know what I mean? By the end of the sermon sweat was sliding off my face as big as marbles. It was like that old son of a buck reached up with a hot finger and poked it right through my belly button.”
He tried to grin, but it wasn’t convincing.
“You’re not making any sense, partner,” I said.
“I’m talking about my old man, Verise Sonnier. He was gone when I went down into the audience, but it was him. God didn’t make two of his kind.”
“Your father was killed in Port Arthur when you were a kid.”
“That’s what they said. That’s what we hoped.” He grinned again, then shook the humor out of his face. “Buried alive under a pile of white-hot boilerplates when that chemical factory blew. Somebody shoveled up a pillow sack full of ashes and bone chips and said that was him. But my sister Drew got a letter from a man in the San Antonio city jail who said he was our old man and he wanted a hundred dollars to go to Mexico.” He paused and stared at me a moment to emphasize his point, as though he were looking into a television camera. “She sent it to him.”
“I’m afraid this has the ring of theater to it, Lyle.”